Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Disney-Themed Tijuana Bibles

HEY! YOU THERE! STOP!

Now listen up! This Very Special Valentine's Day entry is very special indeed. So let me be blunt: if, for some unfathomable reason, you don't want to see crudely-rendered Disney characters engaged in acts of carnal knowledge, don't flippin' well click "read more!" It's that simple!

Otherwise, c'mon in!

…ya filthy degenerate...

So you know what Tijuana Bibles are, right? These little pornographic comic pamphlets that circulated illicitly from the thirties through the fifties? Some of them feature original characters (if calling them "characters" isn't giving them too much credit), but a lot (the bulk?) of them are devoted to proving that rule 34 substantially predates the internet: there were Bibles featuring pretty much any actor, musician, athlete, or even political figure that you could imagine…as well, of course, as plenty of cartoon characters. You can easily find plenty of examples on the internet these days; you can even buy reprints, if you're so inclined--give 'em out along with your Chick Tracts to send serious mixed messages!

I think these things are super-interesting: a genuine strain of outsider art, they really lay bare the collective anxieties and utopian impulses of mid-century America (whether it sounds unbearably pretentious for me to say a thing like that about pictures of cartoon animals having sex, I leave to you). Today's specimens both come from this highly entertaining book.

Our first entry is this untitled thing with Mickey and Donald. The art in this…well, it actually could be worse, as we'll see. And the writer is even able to intermittently capture the characters' voices! Mind you, the question of why Mickey is towering over Donald like that remains open, and the less said about those terrifying…claws of Donald's the better. Seriously, that's some Clive-Barker-esque body-horror right there.

Somehow, that "tee-hee" is just unbearable. And the more I look at Mickey here, the more he looks like some kind of bug.

…which, however, is nowhere NEAR as alarming as Minnie's mobius-strip pose here. Good lord. Note also a common--and perplexing--feature of many of these things: the Glowing Penis™.

But really, if you don't find that bizarre dialogue hilarious, I don't know what to tell you. You are hereby directed to imagine it as voiced by Walt Disney and Marcellite Garner. See? Now it's in your head like that forever. You're welcome.

BUT TROUBLE STRIKES when Donald comes in unexpectedly. This conflict does not seem to make a huge amount of sense. "Dwarf rat" IS a pretty funny thing to call Mickey--if only the artist could've gotten it right.

HEY GUYS WHAT DO YOU THINK MINNIE WANTS?

…well, I hear it's how bonobos settle disputes, so there's precedent. Kind of a standard porn thing, this, reflecting the popular male confusion over the perceived inscrutability of women. This is obviously pretty much the least likely scenario ever, but FUCK! Who can say! Who KNOWS how they think?!? They could be randomly cuckolding you at any time JUST 'CAUSE! Gah!

…hey, wasn't he meant to be staying for dinner? Boy, this comic sure doesn't take its storytelling responsibilities very seriously. Note that at this point, Donald's feet--which at one point had been sort of webbed-ish at any rate--are now just as mutated as his hands. The mutagens are doing their work.

Not much more to say about this, really. I suppose it delivers The Goods if you're looking for a very specific SORT of Goods. Our next entry is actually much stranger, believe it or not.

I wonder what the universal desire is! Let's find out! Oh, and let me write out that title, for the benefit of google searches: "Donald Duck Has a Universal Desire!"

…and what I wouldn't give to hear Clarence Nash deliver that line. That's about the funniest thing I'm capable of imagining. I know that if you invent a time machine you're required by law to use it to kill Hitler, but I know what I'd do with it after that.

What REALLY gets me, though, is those damned lines of doggerel in the upper left. Seriously, what the hell, Anonymous Writer? This isn't that hard: your first line doesn't work because you have three unstressed syllables in a row ("sen to the"); whereas the second line trips over that godawful internal duck/fuck rhyme. For the record, this is what you were looking for: "And now the tale of Donald Duck/All he wants to do is fuck." You couldn't manage that? Sure, it leaves unanswered the question of whom he wants to fuck, but, as you can probably imagine, that'll be answered soon enough.

…well, I guess these lines actually more or less scan, except for that superfluous "(in)." The real question is: Pluto? Waah? Did the writer confuse Pluto and Goofy and try, very badly, to draw the latter from memory? Or is this a representation of some cartoon character I'm not familiar with? Bluh?

More importantly, we finally learn why Donald's so ill-tempered: you can't really tell in the other panels, 'cause bad artwork, but here you can clearly see that his penis is upside down. That's gonna be a source of constant annoyance to anyone.

Oh yeah…you can tell THIS is gonna be hot. I'm sort of impressed that our questionably-literate writer was able to correctly use the word "nigh," too. Clearly, this comic is looking up!

Or…well…I don't…

Seriously, I'm just imagining this: you furtively pay your nickel to the sketchy betrenchcoated dude behind your middle school. He slips you a comic pamphlet. The rest of the day goes by in a blurry, concupiscent haze as you impatiently wait for school to get out so you can examine your illicit treasure. Finally finally FINALLY you get home, ascertain that your parents are out, open it up, and WHAT THE HELL "DONALD DUCK HAS A UNIVERSAL…???" ARGH GODDAMNIT Q@#$#!$@$#QW$RQWEFDS!!!!11

And behold: a straight-up, wholly unadorned reiteration of the old trope that you can have all the gay sex you want, but as long as you're not the receptive partner, you're still not a "sissy" (or, in the modern parlance, a "cream puff inhaler"). I would suspect this of being satirical if the writing in general evinced just a little more self-awareness. As it is, It's hard not to imagine that the writer here is trying to work through issues with his (just a wild guess on the gender…) own sexual identity (as a prolific and easily-recognizable Bible author, his other work generally reinforces this idea). Why he thought cartoon ducks were the ideal medium through which to do this, I could not say. But seriously, I'm not even wholly convinced this is meant to be titillating. It looks like the sex, such as it is, is nothing more than an excuse for the writer to hammer home this idea of masculinity (I joke, but it's quite interesting how this rehearses the same issues as "Mickey Mouse vs. Kat Nipp," albeit in a much cruder register). Well, if so, I hope that he was ultimately able to find some measure of inner peace, even if the culture and his own lack of self-knowledge would seem to militate against this.

(I don't know what to say about that bizarre rendering of Donald's face.)

Anyway, that's all for today, kids. Next time, we'll be back to stuff that--notwithstanding my motherfucking language--is generally suitable for the whole family.

10 Comments:

"...The writer is even able to intermittently capture the characters' voices!"

That's what's most amazing to me—these Disney Tijuana Bibles, like companion volumes devoted to other comic strips of the era, often reflect a genuine effort to mimic the way the characters actually spoke and behaved. When Mickey says "for gosh sakes," you know someone's gone the extra mile.

Donald is smaller than Mickey because in the earliest cartoons and comics of 1934 and 1935, he generally was—compare with ORPHANS' BENEFIT, THE DOGNAPPER, or "The Case of the Vanishing Coats" comic book story.

I wonder if Donald's failure to find a female in the second story is a nod to his cartoon persona's bad luck? "Don's so unlucky he can't even find a female prostitute in town, and has to conform with a transvestite!"

"Think I'm a pervert?" made me laugh heartily..."I'm effin' you from behind right now and just allowed you to go oral on me, but THAT request? What do you think I am?". I'd consider this to be at least slightly tone-in-cheek, and thus, indeed addressing how silly an idea is that only the receptive partner is engaging into gender-confused behavior. Who knows?

Donald looks like he's copied from Taliaferro material circa 1940-41, so this underground comic would predate Gladstone. I think the hooker-duck is actually a modified nephew design (!), with his curly mop simply a hairdo the artist considered unisex and/or sissified.

Hmmm...interesting what you come across here in the backarchive of previous posts. If you care for the modern-day counterpart in Duck comics (albeit *EVEN* cruder than this), you may google for MOUSEBOY.

I do have URLs, but if you'll google him yourself, you've only got yourself to blame. (And yes, the first Google result from "Wikifur, the furry encyclopedia" is about him, you can find a small, tame glimpse there into his debauchery.)

One thing is interesting about Mouseboy: He traces all his characters from existing stories, including Barks, Rosa, Taliaferro, Cavazzano, Carpi, de Vita, Strobl, Milton, Jippes, van Horn...you name it! It's why his "style" changes with every single panel, and if you have a keen eye, you can tell where he got any particular panel from.